The Best Music Videos of All Time, Judged by the Decision That Made Them

The short answer: The best music videos of all time are the ones where a director made a specific decision the rest of the form then borrowed. John Landis shot Thriller as a narrative short film instead of a performance document. Steve Barron made the boundary between animation and live action the plot of Take On Me. Michel Gondry choreographed Around the World so each group of dancers moved only when its instrument played. Hiro Murai built This Is America out of long takes where foreground and background tell contradicting stories. Judge videos by the decision, not the spectacle, and the canon looks different.

The criterion

Most all-time lists are budget rankings with adjectives attached. Iconic. Groundbreaking. Unforgettable. You finish reading having learned nothing you could use.

So here is the rule this list obeys: for every entry, one sentence naming the decision — the thing the director chose to do, or not to do, that the video would collapse without. If we cannot name it, the video is not here, however fondly we remember it. Some very famous videos fail that test, and the absences are deliberate.

They are in rough chronological order, because the borrowing runs forwards. If you are reading this to find something worth stealing for your own release, our guide to making a music video from a song is the practical companion to it.

Fifteen decisions

The form gets invented (1975–1986)

Bohemian Rhapsody — Queen, directed by Bruce Gowers. The decision was economic before it was artistic: make a film so the band does not have to appear on television. Promotional films were not new — the Beatles and Bob Dylan had made them a decade earlier — but this one was expensive, strange, and attached to a number one, which is what turned a cost-saving dodge into something a label would commission on purpose. The much-copied image of four faces multiplying into a diamond was made in-camera, using a video feedback effect — the camera pointed at its own monitor output.

Ashes to Ashes — David Bowie, directed by David Mallet with Bowie. The decision was to abandon naturalistic colour entirely — video processing pushed until the sky read as black behind a figure walking a shoreline. It established that a video could look like nothing you could photograph, and that the artificiality read as intent, not as a fault in the equipment.

Thriller — Michael Jackson, directed by John Landis. The decision was to hire a feature horror director and make a short film: a story with a beginning, a genre, prosthetic makeup by Rick Baker, choreography by Michael Peters, and a running time no broadcaster had a slot for. Every video since that behaves like a film, and not like a document of a performance, is downstream of it.

Take On Me — a-ha, directed by Steve Barron. The decision was to make the medium the plot. Rotoscoped pencil animation — roughly 3,000 frames traced over live footage by Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger across about sixteen weeks, work that won the MTV Video Music Award for special effects — with characters crossing the boundary between the drawn world and the photographed one. The technique is not decoration applied to a story; it is the story.

Sledgehammer — Peter Gabriel, directed by Stephen R. Johnson. The decision was to lock the camera off and animate everything inside the frame — stop-motion and pixilation built with Aardman Animations (Nick Park and Peter Lord among the animators) and the Brothers Quay, with Gabriel holding position frame by frame under glass. One fixed viewpoint, endless invention within it. The opposite of coverage.

Restraint and rot (1990–1999)

Nothing Compares 2 U — Sinéad O'Connor, directed by John Maybury. The decision was to refuse to cut. Almost the entire video is one close-up on one face against a plain ground, and the discipline is in everything the director declined to add. It remains the strongest available argument that the cheapest possible video can be the most devastating one.

Smells Like Teen Spirit — Nirvana, directed by Samuel Bayer. The decision was to make a performance video that looks like it is rotting — a school gymnasium filling with smoke under sickly light, grain and grime left in. At a moment when the form had converged on gloss, choosing ugliness was a positioning statement as much as a look.

Sabotage — Beastie Boys, directed by Spike Jonze. The decision was to shoot the title sequence of a seventies cop show that does not exist, character names and all. It does not reference a genre, it adopts the whole structure — which is why it survives repeat viewing. You are watching a format, not a joke.

Praise You — Fatboy Slim, directed by Spike Jonze. The decision was to shoot on a camcorder, in public, in front of people who had not agreed to be there, and to keep the amateurism. Its power comes from the bystanders' reactions — which you cannot storyboard, only decide to go and find.

Structure as the idea (1997–2018)

Around the World — Daft Punk, directed by Michel Gondry. The decision was to turn the video into a visual score: each group of dancers is assigned one instrument line and moves only while that part plays, on a single set, with the camera holding a slow orbit. It rewards a second viewing in a way almost nothing else on this list does, because on the first you are watching dancers and on the second you are reading the arrangement.

Star Guitar — The Chemical Brothers, directed by Michel Gondry. The same idea, executed so that most viewers never notice it. The view from a train window, in which every recurring musical element has a corresponding recurring object in the passing landscape. Gondry made the structural conceit invisible, which is the harder version of the trick he had already done visibly.

Virtual Insanity — Jamiroquai, directed by Jonathan Glazer. The decision was one practical illusion, sustained for the full runtime and never explained: the room slides while the floor appears to stay still. No cutaway acknowledges it, no shot reveals the mechanism. The refusal to explain is what keeps it from being a party trick.

Hurt — Johnny Cash, directed by Mark Romanek. The decision was to cut archive footage of the young Cash against present-day footage of the old one, shot in the shuttered rooms of his own museum, and let the edit carry the meaning the lyric only implies. An editing idea, which makes it rare on a list like this.

Formation — Beyoncé, directed by Melina Matsoukas. The decision was to make location the argument. The video is set in and about a specific place, and its imagery is not backdrop for a performance but the content the performance is delivering. It reset what a mainstream pop video is permitted to be about.

This Is America — Childish Gambino, directed by Hiro Murai. The decision was to stage two stories in one frame and let the camera stay with the wrong one. Long, mostly unbroken takes keep the performance foregrounded while chaos plays out behind it, so the viewer has to choose where to look and then live with having chosen. The technique is old; forcing the audience to be complicit in it is not.

Where we would push back on the canon

The standard all-time list rewards scale, and scale is the least transferable quality a video has. Count how many of the fifteen above needed money: a locked-off camera with clay in front of it, one face in close-up, a camcorder outside a cinema, dancers on one set, a train window. The expensive entries are the exceptions.

So our disagreement with the received canon is about causation, not taste. Budget buys production value; production value ages badly and gets matched by the next cohort of tools within a decade. What does not age is a rule the director accepted and refused to break — which is why so many of these can be described in a sentence, and why the costliest videos are usually the hardest to summarise.

One honest omission to declare: this list skews towards videos whose decisions are legible from outside. Plenty are great because of performance, casting, or an editor's instinct that resists being named, and a criterion this strict will always undercount them.

Credits and sources

Credits above come from the published record, not from memory. The fullest accounts of the two most-asked-about entries are Creative Review's oral history of "Take On Me" and British Cinematographer's interview with the Aardman team behind "Sledgehammer". Where a technique is disputed — the mechanism behind "Virtual Insanity" being the standing example — we describe what is on screen and decline to pick a side.

What any of this is worth to you

If you are making something of your own, steal the method and not the image. Decide your one rule before you plan a shot — one location, one light source, one unbroken take, one thing that recurs — then let it settle every argument that follows. That is what storyboarding a music video is for, and the stage where a video is won or lost.

The levers that separate a shot that reads as filmic from one that does not are in what makes a music video look cinematic; if you are still choosing a register, how to choose a music video style beats a list of masterpieces as a starting point.

Then the budget question. Several of these were made cheaply on purpose, and the ones that were not stopped being the benchmark for a small artist some time ago. What a music video costs now has moved far enough that the constraint is genuinely the idea again — and you can make one without filming anything.

Frequently asked questions

What separates a great music video from an expensive one?+

A decision you can name in one sentence, executed without hedging. Almost every video on this list can be summarised as a single constraint the director accepted and then refused to break — one held close-up, one locked-off frame, one unbroken take, one illusion never explained. Expense buys production value, which is the thing viewers stop noticing first.

Who are the most influential music video directors?+

The names that recur once you start looking at decisions instead of results: Michel Gondry for structural ideas that turn a video into a visual score, Spike Jonze for format parody and deliberate amateurism, Mark Romanek for restraint and archive, Jonathan Glazer for sustained practical illusions, Hiro Murai for staging that puts two stories in one frame. Several of them moved into features, which tells you something about the form as a training ground.

Is Thriller the best music video ever made?+

It is the most consequential, which is not the same claim. Hiring a feature horror director, shooting on film with a narrative structure and prosthetic makeup, and running well past radio length established that a music video could be a short film with an audience of its own. Whether it is the best depends on whether you rate ambition of scale above precision of idea.

Why do so many great music videos use one simple trick?+

Because a video is short enough that one idea can carry it and long enough that two ideas collide. A single sustained constraint — a held close-up, a moving room, a train window — gives the viewer something to keep noticing, and it gives the director a rule that decides every subsequent question. Videos with three good ideas usually read as having none.

Do music videos still matter now that MTV does not programme them?+

They matter differently. The broadcast slot is gone, but the video is now the asset that feeds every surface an artist has — a full-length upload, vertical cuts, a looping visual behind the track. The economics inverted: distribution became free and production got cheaper, so the constraint moved from access to ideas.

What can an independent artist actually take from these videos?+

That most of them are cheap ideas well executed. A single held shot, an obvious in-camera trick, a shoot with unaware bystanders, a locked-off frame with everything animated inside it — none of those needed a studio. The transferable lesson is to decide on one rule before you plan a single shot, and then let it decide the rest.

Every one of these started as a decision, not a budget.

Melodious turns your song into a shot-by-shot storyboard you can argue with, scene by scene, before you spend anything on video — which is where the decisions get made.

Storyboard your song